Remembrance of Horns Past
A Volkswagen and a marriage short-circuit in 1970s San Francisco.
BY MARK DILLON
THE 2006 FILM Little Miss Sunshine features a scene where the clapped-out Volkswagen van in which the cast is traveling has its horn develop a short so that it makes constant, intermittent beeps as they drive. If you’re not a past owner of one of VW’s rear-engine vans from 1960 to 1990, you might not know that the horn is reminiscent of a bleating calf. It politely requests attention. It may not have the discordant trumpet blast of an American sedan or a German übermensch cruiser, but nonetheless, a stuck horn on a Volkswagen bus will drive one hundred percent of its passengers crazy after a short while.
Seeing this movie scene recently made me hark back to an evening in January 1972 on the oceanside boulevards of San Francisco. The actors were me, my friend Ned, and my 1965 VW van.
Ned and I had grown up in one of the quiet suburbs of Washington D.C.—Alexandria, Virginia, to be precise. Even though we felt like part of the great boomer herd, we were both conceived during World War Two, so in some technical sense we are consigned to the Silent Generation. Of course, most all of the mid-sixties English rock royalty were war babies as well, so lots of us from the tie-dye era are not-quite boomers. I met Ned at middle-school age (although middle-schools didn’t exist in late-fifties Northern Virginia) and we bonded over a shared love for rock singers that freaked out our elders (Little Richard comes to mind), an obsession with getting a driver’s license (age fifteen then in Virginia), and the overpowering urge to blow things up with illegal fireworks (aah, the all-powerful cherry bomb!) As we aged into young adulthood, however, Ned and I diverged: Uncle Sam called when I finished college and gave me something to do for the next couple years, while Ned, through a series of events involving hippie compadres and illicit substances, was deemed undesirable for a stint in the military.
“Now it’s obvious to me that my own callow, hippie-tinged worldview caused me to overlook a household on the verge of collapse.”
While I was involuntarily living in storied South Vietnam, however, Ned did develop a connection to the U.S. Army. In 1969, Ned became romantically involved with Marcia, from Alexandria. Marcia’s dad was a career Army officer, and Marcia had married a young Army lieutenant several years before. The couple had three children in quick succession. Now the sad part: Marcia’s young husband had suffered the fate of all too many junior officers in Vietnam, and Marcia became a war widow at age twenty-four, with three young children.
Ned was the antidote to Marcia’s gloom. He was not from the world of duty and conformity for career’s sake, and would not be dragging Marcia and her kids to a succession of Army bases for decades to come. Ned would earn a living as the creative musician and artistic force he was, and Marcia would gladly supplement his earnings with her widow’s proceeds. That was the theory, anyway.
Ned’s new family moved out west in early 1971. Marcia and Ned wanted vaguely rustic surroundings a short commute away from San Francisco. Marcia had funds at her disposal and underwrote their personal Blue Jay Way: a eucalyptus-shaded one-story ranch house deep in the foothills of Marin County, complete with a grand piano in the rustic, open-beamed living room. The neighborhood was boho central; “macrobiotic” was the dietary password at the local market. Many neighbors planned to make their living producing artisanal thingies in their cottages for sale at craft fairs. Parents hoped that for their kids, Scooby Doo would fade away in the face of live Punch and Judy puppet shows. It was a medieval peasant hamlet life with electricity and Volvos.
As the mother of three growing kids, Marcia soon realized Ned was a bit too well-suited to the layabout lifestyle of Fairfax, California. The tragedy was that Ned was in no way a trust-funder who could take a decade off from the rat race without financial consequences—he could count on earning enough to provide maybe an artist’s garret for the household, nothing more. Putting three kids through college while maintaining a middle-class existence was financial fantasy of a high order for Ned, and Marcia soon began going through the stages of grief for her failing marriage.
At some point between Marcia’s stages of denial and anger, I showed up for a visit.
My personal agenda was to visit with Ned, et al. as I concluded a permanent migration to the west coast from back east at the end of 1971. I knew the kids and seemed to get along well with Marcia—she and I related on the subject of a life within the military. They offered to host me for a week or two as I got my feet under me.
The household tension was palpable within a couple days of my arrival. Ned and Marcia’s bickering ratcheted up steadily. I had the excuse of wanting to explore my new world, so I was off on day trips that took me away from their house, often until evening. At the time I was not astute enough to fully sense what was going on. Now it’s obvious to me that my own callow, hippie-tinged worldview caused me to overlook a household on the verge of collapse.
Ned and I soon undertook a two-week semi-business road trip that had us travel cross-country to Virginia and then back to Fairfax. The fact that Ned could take off with no pushback from Marcia speaks volumes about his domestic situation. When Ned and I arrived back in Marin, we spent one night at the house before Ned was asked to find temporary accommodations while Marcia pondered their future. It was a given that I was included in this request. We had been kicked out.
The Nightfly, Donald Fagen, 1982. (Back cover.)
IN SAN FRANCISCO, Ned and I camped out in the living room of Mike K., an old friend of ours. A decade before, Mike and Ned had been my guides into the secret (to me) world of post-war jazz. Mike’s family had lived not far from Ned and me in the Virginia suburbs. An album by pop musician Donald Fagen called The Nightfly is an homage to Donald’s teen years in the ’burbs. The back cover features a photo of a suburban house late at night, with one upstairs bedroom window lit, and this image always makes me think of nighttime visits to Mike’s family home. After his parents were asleep, Mike, Ned and I would stay up in Mike’s man cave, surrounded by towering stacks of jazz and folk albums. Talk ranged mostly around music. I first tried peyote as music enhancement at Mike’s house around 1964, and Mike and Ned would often pick up their guitars to show each other new riffs or techniques they’d mastered. I was a novice guitarist awed by their abilities. They were happy to share techniques, secure in the knowledge that I was no threat to ever challenge their level of skill. Mike felt San Francisco would be the big rock candy mountain for a folk- and jazz-influenced musician, so he had moved there a bit before Ned. Both of them made a sporadic living working for the music stores on Union Street. Instrument sales and guitar lessons were their bread and butter.
Mike rented a spacious, slightly seedy apartment off Stanyon Street, near the top of Golden Gate Park. The tide of migration outward to the Bay Area suburbs was still at its peak, and Mike’s Inner Richmond District apartment was slightly scruffy and successively rented by the working stiffs of the city. The infrastructure of the city around the building looked much as it is now. The same Muni trolley buses ran past, headed back and forth from the ocean to the Ferry Building. The Transamerica Pyramid was built but not yet open. The hulking double-deck Embarcadero Freeway (which would collapse in the 1989 earthquake) dominated much of the downtown waterfront. The neighborhood streets were lined with the improbably large American sedans of the era rather than the more compact cars of this century. San Francisco was an attractive place to visit, but aside from the flower children, it wasn’t yet a destination for the world.
We had been smoking the usual Mexican ditch weed in Mike’s apartment when, moderately dazed, we began to fixate on the idea of food. There was none in the apartment, so to eat would mean a trip somewhere in my Volkswagen van. We hadn't been drinking, so I felt my driving skills remained top notch. Mike decided he’d put his dope-induced focus to work practicing guitar licks, but Ned and I were ravenous. We knew of a cheap little cafe by the ocean and headed there in the van, creeping along at speeds approaching twenty miles per hour. I felt amazed at how smooth my clutch and shifting coordination was.
I pulled to the curb about a block from the food joint, in a low-lit, mostly residential neighborhood a half-dozen blocks from the ocean. I turned off the engine and Ned and I sat there for a second, gathering our addled wits in the darkness. Ned had brought a couple joints along, in case we were to start losing our buzz on the food foray. In what would have been inspired dialogue for a future Cheech and Chong movie, Ned fretted about the joints he was carrying.
“Hey, man, I can’t take these joints into the restaurant with us,” he said. Never mind that we had driven to the restaurant with them.
“Well, what are we gonna do?” I said, having immediately bought into the stoner’s logic with which Ned had laid out our problem.
“We have to stash them here in the car,” he said, because...oh, who knows why.
“Where?” I asked.
“I know—under the horn button!” he said. The VW van’s horn button was a circular, three-inch medallion in the center of the steering wheel. “We’ll just pop off the button and stash them under it while we’re in eating!”
With no further rational thought, Ned reached over and began prying the button off with his fingers. Somehow he managed to get just the right purchase, and the button popped off in his hand. Unfortunately, the van and the neighborhood were immediately filled with the loud, steady bleating of a Volkswagen horn in full song.
“Turn it off...!” we both cried.
Ned slammed the horn button back onto the center of the steering wheel. This resulted in not the slightest pause in the horn racket. I wrenched the van keys from the ignition switch. The horn continued its maddening din. What to do? Our impaired but adrenaline-soaked brains shuffled rapidly through our knowledge of car repair. Mad solutions passed between us. We could open up the engine hatch and start pulling wires until this devil’s noise ceased! Or maybe we could start ripping wires under the dashboard right in front of us! Yeah!
Fortunately, one of us eventually peered into the top of the steering wheel, feebly lit by the car’s interior roof light. A loose wire, the connection to the horn button, was sparking against the hollow metal center of the steering wheel. The bleating seemed to drown all other sounds in the entire Sunset District. With total disregard for my safety in the face of twelve mighty volts of battery power, I reached into the column with my thumb and forefinger and grasped the offending wire. Blessed silence! As long as I kept the wire from grounding itself, the world was quiet. The only sound was our rapid breathing as we tried to re-oxygenate our brains. We both expected an angry mob or the San Francisco police to surround us in a few minutes. How would we explain this criminal moment to our cellmates in the slammer?
But the silence stretched out, and out. “Wow, man! Haha!”
Ned found an oily rag under the back seat of the van. I wrapped it around the wire and stuffed it into the steering column. We could get home in silence and fix it in the morning. But first, we must eat. Up the dark sidewalk we wobbled.
Ned at the piano. Fairfax, California, early 1970s. Photo by Mark Dillon.
HOURS LATER, back at Mike’s place, Ned and I grew pensive as we slumped on the ratty living room couch. We both pondered a sobering future. My reluctant conclusion was that San Francisco was a place where I would drift aimlessly with my buddies until the money ran out. I would van north alone within the week to visit a friend who had moved to Portland—it would be my first look at my soon-to-be home, and Oregon would prove to be an astringent shift from the dreamscape of the Bay area.
And Ned? Well, he was officially a single man again in less than two years—Marcia cut her losses and opted for a grounded, single-parent lifestyle in Fairfax. Ned moved into the city and by 1975, he was remarried. He met the woman who would become his second wife through—oh, yes—personalized guitar lessons.
Mark Dillon is a retired, long-time Portlander busy cataloging the detritus of his personal existence. A southern boy, he is a graduate of the University of Virginia from a time when Animal House would have been viewed as a slightly overblown documentary on campus life. Mark is working to complete a memoir that will completely baffle anthropologists of the 22nd century.
